Eblo

This is only a test of a Google Gadget

This may or my not be a race I may or may not have run with My Darling Rose.

Boo!

Yet again, it's been far too long since I've posted here. Oh well. Blame Twitter and/or Facebook if you must. Quick hit-and-run run-down:

A) Em's great. I love that little girl. Words and photos fall miles short of describing her awesomeness.

B) I ran a marathon in April and I'm supposedly training for the Chicago Marathon in October, but I haven't run in almost 2 full weeks due to a creeping illness which has taken away all of my energy. Need to shake it off soon.

C) I never wrote a proper Illinois Marathon wrap-up. I thought I had one well underway, but all I can find now is my 'notes' file. Here it is:

<Quote>
What went wrong:
Inconsistency in first 10 (and throughout). a) Should have had 1-mile paces. b) park route was slow and passing was impossible c) 2nd half was hillier than expected.
Calf cramp - pre-race stretching? Water/nutrition?
Hip fatigue - stride?
Wind/uphills = mental. 9MPH headwinds on the uphill stretch around Mile 18-19.
Tingling in last 2-3 miles.

What went right:
Tim, Chris, Dennis.
Had gas left to sprint the end.
Weather (other than wind).
CROWD/VOLUNTEER SUPPORT!!!

Other points:
The Champaign Country Club mile SUCKED! My slowest mile.
Garmin was good, but it disagrees with reality. It gave me about 0.01 mile extra per course mile. At the end of the race, that added up to over a quarter mile of difference. It's minor, but noteworthy. Also, for whatever reason, my watch time differs from the official chip time but nearly a minute. I'm not sure how to resolve that.
<EndQuote>

My photos from the event.
Tim Borbely's photos from the event.

Oh and here, listen to this PODCAST about the Illinois Marathon: 061_2009IllinoisMarathonPodcast.mp3

D) Motorcycling:
i) Not ONLY motorcycling related, but everyone who drives should visit The Black Nail Brigade web site and in particular, read The Black Nail Brigade Manifesto. This is no joke. This is not a fashion statement. This is about life and death and the preservation and prevention thereof. Go. Read. Now. I'll wait for you.

ii) Been doing a bit of riding. Not much on the dual sport, but some here and there.

iii) Got waylaid by a minor accident in May when an ignorant woman pulled in front of me. You can search out details in my Flickr photo stream. I am well or at least really close to it, the bike is well, damage insurance has been settled, injusry insurance is still outstanding.

iv) Just bought tickets to the Moto GP races in Indianapolis at the end of August. This will be my first race experience ever, believe it or not - car, motorcycle, whatever. Should be a blast.

E) Computers - I've been burned out on technology lately in part because a seriese of hardware failures have just beaten the crap out of me both at home and at work. But I've lately heard about some interesting projects which have rekindled a bit of a spark. I no particular order of usefulness to my life, examples are: Xen, eyeOS, Evernote (used it before, using it more now), a cheap analog to digital video capture device from Woot!, some stuff with MythTV, and a few other things I've forgotten already. OLPC or something like it for Emily? Anyway, yeah, tech = cool.

F) Pets: Harrison died back in November. Not sure if I ever posted that. Also, a few months back we got fish. Now we have a TON of them. And a snail. I love watching them.

G) Flying. Have done NONE in a long, LONG time. Doesn't even look like I'll make it to Oshkosh this year. A bummer, but oh well. *sigh*

Ok, I'm running out of steam on this latest hit-and-run. As I always say, I'll try not to be such a stranger. Yeah, right.

Later.

Running Other Than When Chased

An interweb friend just asked me about getting started running. The question was:
I'd like to start running. Do I really need to do a walking plan first like i keep reading? I do yoga & spinning now and some walking 5/wk.

I thought I'd post my response here in case anyone else cared.

First off, I am by no means an expert. I'm still trying to figure a lot of this stuff out myself and rely heavily on google, pre-established *conservative* running programs, and listening to my body.

I did not start with a walking routine per se. I actually started with bicycling and gradually added in running, but my initial running - even just a mile - had a lot of walk breaks sprinkled in - pretty much out of necessity. The key, I think, is to NOT overdo it. It takes a while for the knees, ankles, feet, and even bones to get used to the impacts and motions of running even if your heart and lungs have a good base (mine didn't). It's vastly different from riding a bike. So if you overdo it, it'll suck, and you'll never want to do it again. That's what kept me from running before - the classic folly of waking up one morning, deciding I needed to get into shape, running 2 blocks all-out, dying, and crawling back to the couch.

So, yes, there will be, and should be, some walking involved I would say. But how much depends on the feedback from your body. Even now, there are some 'runs' where I just don't have it and end up walking a good third or more. But that gets into the mental side of running a bit, too. :)

I know you're not starting from 'the couch,' but if you google "couch to 5k," you'll find a lot of good beginner advice. Again, I suggest starting conservative. The forums at RunnersWorld.com are pretty good, too, though I haven't been over there in a while myself.

One thing I find invaluable in training is my heart rate monitor. Training by one properly takes a whole new set of google searches, and again I make no claims of being an expert, but once I got the basics down, it really helped keep me from over exerting and burning out.

I hope this helps in some way. If you've got more questions, shoot, but remember, I don't know what I'm talking about!

Good luck. Get going!

MythTv ist kaput!

For a few months, smartd has been letting me know that the boot drive on my MythTV box was getting up in years - it's a 160 GB drive and I got it when those were about $150. I don't remember when that was, but it's been a few years and the thing runs 24/7/365. Anyway, I promptly ordered a 500 GB drive to replace it when those were about $150, but have yet to install it. It was going to be somewhat complicated because LVM spans to that drive. I don't have time. Etc. Etc.

This past weekend, MythTV crashed hard and wouldn't reboot. When attempting power cycles, I heard the dreaded "Click of Death" of a drive that doesn't know its ass from a hole in the ground. Damn.

At the time, we were heading out to early Christmas with the in-laws and I'd been up all night, coincidentally, recovering stuff off a failed external backup drive. So I didn't have it in me to deal with it at the time. I removed the offending/clicking drive, threw it in the freezer, and did my best to forget about it (yes, I know the freezer trick is unlikely to do any good in this case, but it doesn't hurt to try).

A few days later, I had some time to throw the remaining drives into a freshly installed Debian box to survey the landscape and see if my system backups were intact - there's a relatively new 320 GB drive in there as well with 100 GB set aside for music files and the rest reserved for backup files. I've got rsync scripts which mirror stuff from my local linux boxes to there. My hope was to get to the backups, mirror it to the 500 GB replacement drive, hack LILO a bit, and hopefully be back up and running.

Imagine my surprise when I mounted the non-LVM partitions and found the /, /usr/, /var/, and /home/ partitions intact! So wait, what? WHICH DRIVE IS IN THE FREEZER THEN? Sure as shit, the drive which failed was the MP3 drive. The backup drive. The NEWEST drive which has NEVER thrown a SMART error. WTF? The up-side is that - yay, my MythTV video files were safe because my LVM partitions are still around. And yay, I still have all of the original CDs we've owned and the stuff I've purchased digitally is for the most part also on my laptop AND on my iPod. But the bummer is that unless I can pull the files off my iPod with Amarok, which I may, I'll have to re-rip all those CDs. I'll also lose an ass-tonne of podcasts, grey-market MP3s, and random things I stashed on that drive 'temporarily,' like rips of DVDs for transfer to our iPods. Also, backups. Gone.

But wait, there's more!!!
(but I never finished this post)

2008 Team Ortho Monster Dash Half Marathon Race Report

Click to listen, right-click to save -> 2008 Team Ortho Monster Dash Half Marathon Race Report - October 25 - 33MB - 48:09

On October 25, 2008, My Darling Rose and I ran the Team Ortho Monster Dash Half Marathon in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This was my first half marathon and MDR's third. This is our race report while driving home a few days after the race. Sorry about the fussy baby in the background.

Some links:

Team Ortho
http://www.teamortho.us/

Medals for Mettle
http://medals4mettle.org/

Course Map
http://www.mapmyrun.com/run/united-states/mn/minneapolis/154103639181

Out Out Out the Door!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fd-MWlCQvH8

Contact info:
- email: eblo at ratula dot net
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